Jury
Composed of artists, scholars, curators, and community activists, the Project Jury is responsible for selecting Monuments to Migration and Labor’s three monument installation artists, who will partner with community and project stakeholders in New Jersey’s three regions. The jury will identify monument concepts that capture New Jersey’s diverse and layered histories of migration and labor, and that honor the collaborative, participatory ethos of the overall project.
Nina Cooke John is the founding principal of Studio Cooke John Architecture and Design, a multidisciplinary design studio that values placemaking as a way to transform relationships between people and the built environment.
Studio Cooke John’s Shadow of A Face, the Harriet Tubman Monument in Newark, NJ was unveiled in March 2023. The studio was awarded a 2021 AIA Merit Award for the public art installation, Point of Action, commissioned for the Flatiron public plazas in 2020 and currently on view at the Wassaic Project. Nina was named the AIANY New Perspectives honoree in 2024 and a 2022 United States Artists Fellow. She is a 2024 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize recipient for Exhibit Columbus. Her work has also been featured in Architectural Record, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Dwell, NBC’s Open House, and PBS NewsHour Weekend among other publications and news outlets.
Nina earned her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and a master’s in architecture from Columbia University. She now teaches at Columbia University.
Patricia Eunji Kim is Assistant Professor at New York University. Dr. Kim’s research, teaching, and curatorial projects explore questions of gender, race, monumentality, and memory in antiquity and in the present.
Her monograph, The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World (Cambridge University Press, 2025), is the first book-length study on the visual and material culture of Hellenistic queenship—a corpus of materials central to a show that she is guest-curating at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Dr. Kim has produced several exhibitions, articles, and interdisciplinary books on ancient and contemporary monument cultures, ecological temporalities, and contemporary receptions of antiquity.
Kathleen Ogilvie Greene is a trained visual artist leading with her creative and improvisational practice as Chief Audience Officer at Grounds For Sculpture (GFS) in Hamilton, NJ.
Greene is an experienced executive with a demonstrated history of creating sustainable institutional impact through system creation alongside community-centered engagement through program and curatorial practice. Her work plays a critical role in prioritizing non-traditional museum goers while creating sustainable pipelines for broader community partnership and relationship building. She has previously worked for the Barnes Foundation, Fleisher Art Memorial and Mural Arts Philadelphia. Greene received a BFA from Howard University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Susanna V. Temkin is Interim Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York and holds a PhD. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
At El Museo, she has curated or co-curated exhibitions including the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, Culture and the People (2019); Estamos Bien – La Trienal (2020-2021); DOMESTICANX (2022); and Flow States – La Trienal 2024, among others. Prior to El Museo, she served as Assistant Curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.
Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP, has worked for more than three decades to enhance quality of life, advance economic equity and promote social justice in communities. He carries a wide-ranging perspective from his career as a journalist, urban planner who specializes in community economic development, leadership coach, educator, creative placemaker, and nonprofit executive.
As Executive Director of the Northern New Jersey Community Foundation, a nonprofit organization that serves an eight-county region of more than 4.3 million people, Vazquezworks to make life better for more people in North Jersey by enhancing public places, building alliances to address critical community issues and connecting community-oriented organizations with valuable resources.
In addition to his executive duties, Leo leads the Foundation’s environmental and economic development projects, and a new initiative to create a National Heritage Area in North Jersey.
